During the recording sessions for Nico Muhly's Drones & Piano, sometimes the piano bench squeaked. "Bench was loud," I said, after a particularly squeaky take. Through my earbud, I heard the voice of engineer Paul Evans. "I rather like it," he said. Paul wasn't being entirely serious, but he was hinting (or poking fun?) at an approach to recording that resembles Dogme 95 or "Remodernist" films. As high technology allows us to achieve … [Read more...]

A distinguishing trait of Mozart's music is rapidly and frequently changing character, Affekt, or mood. He's a quick change artist.
For the 21st-century listener, it's simplistic to hear only a single unvarying Affekt or character in an entire movement of old music. We tend to hear the changes.
Mozart's music may offer an extreme, an almost constantly shifting and evolving rendering of human state-of-mind. It's classical-sonata … [Read more...]

Bruce Brubaker

I'm Bruce Brubaker -- not Bruce Wayne! And yet, while I chair the piano department at America's oldest institution of professional musical training, New England Conservatory in Boston, increasingly technology turns my professional piano playing life into a kind of "caped crusade." Read More…

PianoMorphosis

Music is changing. Society's changing. Pianists, and piano music, and piano playing are changing too. That's PianoMorphosis. But we're not only reacting...
From the piano -- at the piano, around the piano -- we are agents of change. We affect … [Read More...]